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“What are you doing?”
Lumine jolts and instinctively puts an arm over the letter she’s been writing as her breath hitches at the voice. The candle lit on her desk flickers with the sudden move, and she internally curses to herself. She can feel the wet ink sticking on her arm as Amber approaches her.
It has been a good while since Lumine has been sent to Mondstadt as a spy in order to aid the Abyss Order in their cause. Mondstadt is… well, the Knights of Favonius are a strong-willed bunch–well, most of them are– but in the face of a full-fledged attack from the Abyss, they barely have any chance. Most of the Knights are ordinary looking people with ordinary lives, no Vision, no particularity, no nothing; and Lumine can’t bring herself to care about them much.
Though, she has come to realize (to her despair) that she enjoys spending time with some of them. Amber, Kaeya and Jean are the first that come to mind.
Her fondness for Amber is perhaps the most infuriating one. It’s sweet torture, the forbidden apple that she made the mistake of biting and everything is mixed up and more complicated than it needs to be. Every second Lumine spends with the girl feels like she’s soaring high above the clouds, yet there’s a heavy feeling in her chest that constantly reminds her of the fact that she should not be feeling like this.
Her brother should have warned that fondness could have bloomed into questioning. Questioning is the distant cousin to doubt.
She wishes she hadn’t come to know it so soon.
“You’ve been staying awake until ungodly hours of the night for quite some time now,” Amber continues with a cough. She’s behind Lumine’s chair now, her eyes dance between her and the piece of parchment her arm’s covering. Her bare hands make a soft noise as they graze the polished wood, and Lumine feels like her heart is going to jump out of her chest. “You know you can tell me anything, right?”
I don’t want to do this.
I don’t want to betray the Knights of Favonius.
I don’t want to betray you .
“Yeah, I know,” Lumine instead sighs as she turns towards her, her hand still resting over the sheet of paper, “and I promise everything is okay. I was just about to head to sleep.”
She notices Amber’s eyes flick towards the candle. It’s barely been 15 minutes since she lit it up, judging by the very few droplets that drip down the length of it. The brunette raises an eyebrow.
“It’s really late, you know,” Lumine tries changing the subject, “shouldn’t you be asleep as well?”
“Well… I guess you have a point as well,” Amber replies sheepishly as she clears her throat. “I was asleep, though, I just woke up.”
Only then Lumine catches the faint sheen of wetness on her puffy cheeks glowing with the soft blaze.
She immediately gets up from where she’s sitting, cupping Amber’s face as she scrutinizes her expression with genuine worry in her eyes for any explanation. “What happened?”
“It’s- it’s nothing, don’t worry,” she replies, looking away from her intense gaze staring right through her body and into her soul, but doesn’t push her away. The proximity makes her feel tense, but not unpleasant. “Just a silly nightmare, that’s all.”
“You know you can tell me anything.”
Amber weighs the offer in her head.
“You don’t have to if you don’t want to, but I’m concerned, and—”
“I… I saw you.” Amber’s voice starts to tremble despite her best efforts. She takes a deep breath, trying to calm herself down, but it isn’t enough, her hands shake and she curls them into fists and sinks her nails into her palms.
“You saw… me?”
Something knots in Amber’s throat at Lumine’s prodding question, yet she forces herself to continue.
“You were with three Abyss Mages, and you were talking to them, you had worn a black dress instead of your usual one and you… you were so cold. Me and Kaeya and Jean came, and you just grinned at us. Called us fools for… for trusting you so easily. Said you were with the Abyss Order all along. We had to… we had to fight you, and I fired an arrow at you, and it…” She can’t bring herself to tell the rest.
A part of her feels guilty for even mentioning this to Lumine, for indicating that her mind even dares to wander that far. She feels almost disrespectful to her, to the secret adoration she harbors.
Maybe it’s because of the same love that she’s so afraid of losing her that her mind conjures up these scenarios.
Lumine doesn’t say a word as she wraps her arms around Amber and pulls her into her embrace, and she lets herself sob into the blonde’s shoulders for a while. Her arms shake as she reciprocates the hug, and she’s greeted with the familiar scent of something foreign and soft rubs on her back. “I’m here, I’m here.” She feels Lumine’s breath fan on her ear.
It eases her mind, and as minutes pass, her sobs grow quieter and quieter until they finally stop.
Amber can breathe again.
Lumine is here. She’s not with the Abyss Order. She’s with the Knights of Favonius.
She’s with her.
"Are you feeling better now?” Lumine’s soft voice shakes her from her thoughts, and Amber feels her embrace loosening. (She wishes she had the courage to keep her arms right where they were and never let go.)
“Y-yeah,” she manages to stutter as she awkwardly backs away from the hug, wiping her face with her forearm. “Thank you.” Amber looks down at the ground, and notices the paper Lumine had been working on had fallen on the ground.
“Hey,” she calls out to the girl as she crouches to grab it, “you dropped this.”
“Amber, wait-”
It’s too late though, Amber has already grabbed it and she turns it upright to give it to Lumine, but her curious eyes linger on the paper for a second too long and a glint catches her eye.
A purple glint.
An all-too-familiar purple glint.
Her eyes widen.
Lumine reaches out to snatch the letter from her hand, but Amber acts quicker than her and manages to slide from her reach.
“Amber, give that back, please!” But it’s too late, as Amber holds the parchment in front of the flickering flame, and the purple mark of the Abyss Order cheekily grins back at her. Nothing written in the letter–the intact part of it anyway, most of the ink is smudged on Lumine’s forearm–makes sense to her, it’s all written in a language foreign to her.
It doesn’t take an expert linguist to figure out the mark and the letter is written in the same characters.
Amber glances up at Lumine, and she looks back at her with an expression of thinly-veiled panic. She makes a grab at the letter again, which the brunette dodges.
“So you’ve been working with the Abyss Order this whole time?” she asks, despite knowing the answer. Her voice trembles, there’s a lump that settles in her throat as her gaze dances between Lumine and the letter in desperation. The parchment crumples in her shaky grip.
“Look, Amber, please let me explain–”
“What is there to explain?!” she shouts, trying to blink away the tears that prick her eyes. “You… you’ve never been on our side this whole time! All the monster attacks on the city, this entire Stormterror ordeal, it was all because of you! Everything you’ve done for the Knights, for Mondstadt, for…” She can’t bring herself to say “me”.
She never really cared about Amber, did she? This was all a ploy, a sick and twisted game for her; and she had fallen for it.
There’s a stomach churning silence that settles in the room.
Amber feels like her whole world is falling apart.
“It was all just playing pretend for you, wasn’t it?”
Warm tears stream down her cheeks for the second time that night, and broken sobs shake her shoulders. She can feel her knees hit the ground through the haze that clouds her mind. Every passing second only twists the knife in her soul and pushes it deeper, blood gushes out of the wound as the only thing she can bring herself to do is cry and cry and cry.
“I didn’t mean it to turn out this way,” Lumine whispers at last, guilt washing over her thoughts. Amber is like a trainwreck she can’t look away from, breaking down and crumbling to pieces right in front of her eyes, yet she can’t do anything to help her.
Amber looks up. She looks horrendous.
Lumine wishes Amber would shoot an arrow at her, or slap her across the face, or call Jean and get her arrested right then and there, just anything else other than sobbing at her feet. Anger would hurt less. Hate would hurt less. Physical pain would hurt less.
She opens her arms and ducks down to her level for one last pathetic attempt at calming her down.
Amber scurries backwards in delirious panic from the girl who once was her best friend in the whole world.
Her hand immediately moves to the side of Lumine’s desk to grasp the hilt of her sword. Cold steel feels slippery in her clammy hands.
“Don’t come any closer.” Amber feels like a little child holding the sword. The weapon feels too clunky and heavy, and her grip is awkward and amateurish, yet her voice and the very tip of the blade pointing to Lumine’s throat is more than enough to drive her point across.
The shaking fury mixed with agony makes Lumine’s heart shatter.
She slowly backs away, her hands up in the air, and moves towards the window and her backpack under it. Amber doesn’t do anything but watch as she packs the little belongings she has acquired throughout her journey. The only things that disturb the dead silence are Amber’s sniffles and the rustling of leather.
Lumine hails herself up to the edge of the window. The inky sky glimmers with the flickers of the thousand stars above them. The moon smiles down at her in pity with a crescent smile, the chilly wind brushes against her face and only then does she realize the tears wetting her face.
She casts one last glance at Amber, then she spreads her wings and glides away.
"I'm so sorry."